


The Bite That Cures

by tylermblue



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Multi, Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 20:17:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16541489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tylermblue/pseuds/tylermblue
Summary: After the battle with Riot and Drake, Eddie still has Venom—or at least he thinks so. Venom is completely silent, immobile, and unresponsive no matter what Eddie does, but they're still there.Now that his life is no longer in immediate danger, Eddie finally has to face the fact that there is an alien inside of him. He has to figure out how to save them, how to take care of them, and understand why he wants to.





	The Bite That Cures

Venom wasn’t gone. Eddie knew what it felt like when they were; he’d had the symbiote torn out of him and shoved back inside and ripped out again enough times in the past two days—in the past five minutes—to know what it felt like. And they  _ weren’t  _ gone.

 

Almost. Almost. But not yet.

 

“Venom,” he gasped, because his throat was raw, his voice was shot, he was exhausted. The very act of treading water was some unique new form of agony, and every muscle in his body was screaming—that was probably how it felt to save the world. There was a reason all those superhero guys were ripped—and he hadn’t even  _ done most of the work.  _ He couldn’t imagine how  _ they  _ were feeling.

 

Well, he didn’t have to. Because he ached more than any normal human could ache. Not like he’d been awake for days—he had—and not like he’d just died—he had—or been tased multiple times, or been hit by a car and broken a fucking _obscene_ amount of bones, or been shot at by SWAT members and goons or been attacked by a symbiotically enhanced homeless woman and more goons or knocked himself the fuck out against the tile on his bathroom wall, or any of that other shit he’d been through in the last _forty-eight fucking hours_ … because he _had_. Somehow it was so much more than that. He ached with _Venom’s_ pain, and they were dying.

 

So he said, “ _ Venom _ ,” again because the silence inside of him was the worst sound he’d ever heard, but there wasn’t a response. The fucking alien hadn’t shut up  _ once  _ since they’d first taken up residence in Eddie’s cerebral cortex and now, the one time Eddie wanted them to talk, there was nothing but radio silence. He just wanted to know that they were okay, that Eddie wasn’t just carrying around the carcass of an advanced lifeform underneath his skin, but… bupkis.

 

He needed to get out of this fucking water before he got brained by spaceship debris.

 

Eddie wasn’t the strongest of swimmers, growing up in New York City and all, but he didn’t have much of a choice right now. After all of that shit he’d just dealt with, there was absolutely no way he was going to drown in the San Francisco Bay.

 

Venom had saved him a hundred times since the day they first bonded. The least Eddie could do was save them back.

 

He managed to all but drag himself onto the nearest shore. His teeth were chattering, and his clothes were soaked down to the bone, his sneakers lost somewhere down in the water. This would’ve been a perfect time to collapse, in his opinion, but Eddie needed… he got out of the water, and now he  _ needed  _ to… 

 

He needed to eat. He was  _ starving _ .

 

“Okay,” Eddie said, and he realized then that he was wheezing. Wheezing like he couldn’t catch his breath for the life of him. “Okay, V. We need to… we need to get some food in us, okay? We need to…” Getting to his feet was a lot harder than it had ever been before. “We should see Dan.”

 

The lack of response—no complaints, no protests, not even a flash of emotion—just made him want to talk more. Try harder. Babble. Babbling, he was good at. Better than good. One of the best. And it was something to concentrate on while he shifted to his knees, pushed himself to his feet. The beach here was more of a rockpile than sand, and it was painful to walk on.

 

What he’d do now for some of that extraterrestrial strength.

 

“We can go to Dan, have him… look at me, yeah? I won’t let him use the MRI or… or anything… I won’t let him do anything like that to you again, man.” God, he was freezing.

 

He had to be a fucking sight: some soaking wet guy stumbling around in the dark like he was three sheets to the wind, desperately talking to himself. The kind of person you cross the street to avoid. He thought he’d hit a low before, but this was beyond bedrock. Right now it was the easiest thing in the world to admit that he was  _ nothing _ without Venom. 

 

He hadn’t been going anywhere with his life, wasn’t succeeding at a single thing besides taking up space and contributing to pollution or whatever. He’d ruined lives, the lives of good people—Anne, most specifically. And Maria. To be more general, half the population of San Francisco was feeling the after-effects of his car chase with the LIFE Foundation thugs. People were hurt. People were dead. He’d only been able to help because of Venom.

 

Eddie Brock was a loser that Venom had  _ chosen _ , for whatever fucked up reason, and then he’d let Venom down. He’d let them  _ die _ .

 

“You saved the world, V, you know that?” Eddie swiped the back of his hand over his mouth. His nose was running. His face felt hot. “You saved the fuckin’ world, Venom, and you didn’t even… you stupid fucking alien. You didn’t even live to see it.”

**Author's Note:**

> I've been waffling about posting this for a little bit. I saw the movie twice and decided I wanted to write a super ambitious post-canon fic, so... this happened. I'm trying not to false-advertise so tags will be added as it unfolds.


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